Hungry for the sunrise

It is the eve of the Triduum, Maundy Thursday, and I am hungry, starving, ravenous for the Man of Sorrows in Gethsemane. I go first to my church, and it is holy and sacred there. I walk up with head bowed to receive communion, the Bread and the Chalice, and the women serving say it quiet in the dark sanctuary, "The body of Christ, broken for you, Genevieve. The blood of Christ shed for you, Genevieve." I eat and I drink, but I am still hungry, soul-hungry.

I emerge from the dark sanctuary to a glorious sunset that speaks of the holiness of this night. Two thousand years ago, Jewish followers of Christ preparing for Pentacost. Jesus, washing dirty feet, serving bread and wine, speaking of the mysteries of faith.

I go to another church. Recite the Creed, pray on my knees as they do here, take communion. They say again, "The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ shed for you." In silence at the end, the altar is cleared, the lights are dimmed to near darkness, and most go out in silence. I stay on knees aching and pray for deliverance, as He did that last night.

Good Friday comes, and work is hard and long, but the hunger in my soul remains. I go to another church, not mine, and sit in the dim sanctuary where the cross is now draped with black and the only light is that of the sunset coming through the stained glass windows. Tonight is about the Cross, the moment when Christ took the sins of the world upon His ravaged body and willing soul. A familiar hymn is sung, and I am still singing it still today...

Jesus, Lamb of God,

You take away the sins of the world.

Have mercy on us.

Jesus, bread of Life,

You take away the sins of the world.

Have mercy on us.

Jesus, Prince of Peace,

You take away the sins of the world.

Have mercy on us.

Grant us peace.

Miserere nobis.

~Agnus Dei (sung here in Latin), English translation, based on John 1:29~

Another church. I kneel again. Ask for the continual redemption He promises for our daily lives...so different from the solitary moment of salvation, when we choose to be followers, believers. What I need today is the power of the Holy Spirit who came to dwell in me at that moment of salvation - I need Him to help me resist and to turn away from sin and to count blessings instead of spewing cursing. Continue to work out my salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). A friend's words whisper in my quiet mind, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).

This, my friends, is the hard road of sanctification...the red road of Gethsemane upon which we are slowly freed from the clutches of sin that so easy crowds in and crowds out...this depression, this spiritual battle, this day. It is redeemed already, yes - but sanctification, like salvation, is entered into by choice, and it is work. Sanctify: to set apart for sacred purpose, to free from sin, to purify.

To work out one's salvation is to be hungry, for we are never filled. It is to ache with emptiness, for we are not yet perfected. It is to count successes and to grieve failures, to be broken over and over again for the sins of self and the sins of the world. And yet...Jesus said it there, hanging bloodied on the Cross, to the thief who had no hope of a lifetime of sanctification: paradise. At the end, paradise. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we will be free at last! (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

We process through the stations of the Cross, singing as we go: behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Savior of the world. As I bow in the dark church empty of Jesus, even the statue of Him carried out as it was to the tomb, my thoughts turn to His journey in those 3 days between death and resurrection. I am shattered with thankfulness. Filled with hope. Truly, all hope rests in the resurrection, the sunrise of Easter Sunday and the empty tomb. For what have I to fear if not death itself? As I fast in vigil tonight, it is with hope and an expectant soul: for sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

"Broken"

Walking back into the light

I've been walking in the dark. Honing my night vision, spiritually. Psalm 51 has been a great comfort: Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare Your praise. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart You will not despise. I am reminded of a time such as this when repentance healed my broken heart, so broken it felt dead and silent inside me.  I "turn my mind", words so similar to the definition of "repentance", the Hebrew word  שׁוּבָה transliterated "shubah", meaning a return or a turning away from.

I remember, too, that I counted gifts then, wrote them down with paper and ink so they were there, indelible, monuments of God's faithfulness to bless me even in the dark night. And so, again, I pick up notebook, the one with pages and pages of the sins I've committed, the one I wrote my heart out in this past week. Spewing sadness. On top of the new page I tape the template for the tattoo I got on my wrist on Monday, covering up scars: Choose Life, from Deuteronomy 30 - the chapter of Scripture with the heading "The Offer of Life or Death". And then I begin again, at number 2,000, to number gifts. My therapist calls this "accumulating positives". Life hangs in the balance, and I choose to pile more on the side of Life and Joy than on Despair and Death.

The sunlight streams back into my soul, and I have 3 good days in a row. (I whisper this, as if hope may truly BE the thing with feathers that perches on the soul, and perhaps would will take wing if startled.) I have chosen the long, slow road of faith. There are quicker ways to peace, but none other that lasts for eternity. In the carbon black days of depression, I pray the fire in my brain is forming diamonds. For today, I simply give thanks for a good day. A reprieve, a relief, like the sigh as you lay head on pillow after a hard day's work, muscles melting and pain fading as you rest.

Photo credit: Sarah Bessey

#2001 breakfast in bed

#2002 children's morning smiles as they serve it

#2003 skills lab with 50 eager students

#2004 laughing with my mama

Choices in the dark

I strap on the yellow snowshoes given me by my love early in our marriage, because yellow always makes me smile. But today, my face is stuck in fear, grief, despair.

Night is falling, and I trek down the woods path through 4 foot drifts, floating atop, falling occasionally. I'm on a quest to find the big cottonwood, the one it would take 4 grown men to wrap their arms around. Trees like this don't just happen in Wisconsin. This tree is sacred.

I have the vague idea that if I could just sit there a while, my back against the solidness of that trunk, there would be peace for a few moments. I think, too, about staying there in the dark. Wonder if it would be easy to just go to sleep in the cold. My brain catches the thoughts in it's sieve and I turn them over in my mind and reject them. No precious stones there. I thank God for the cottonwood tree, pray that He will help me stand up and walk home. Choose life once more.

Darkness falls quickly in the woods. But I am smiling now. My breath comes hard and fast, I take off my mittens because the work has warmed all the places I felt dead inside. I pace my breathing. I take a chunk of snow in my bare hand and push it against forehead, the cold bringing my soul rushing back inside, ready for the walk home.

And as the sun sets, and the woods turn entirely to shadow, the snow gray instead of white, I emerge from the woods onto the road and home. I have survived, walked through this temptation. I whisper words from the one Psalm that jumps like Living Water from the pages of an otherwise lifeless Bible:

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. Save me from bloodguilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart. O God, YOU will not despise. (Psalm 51:12-17 exc.)

Danger signs

Black arches up against the pale winter sky, trees stripped bare of leaves standing silently in the windless woods. Black as sin against the purity of Holiness.

Sweat trickles down my back under down parka, and my steps are whispering Danger as I trudge through the drifts down to the water's edge.

The music thunders in my ears against the silence of this glen. "Cold is the water, it freezes your already cold mind, already cold, cold mind; death is at your doorstep, and it will steal your innocence, but it will not steal your substance." (Mumford & Sons, Timshel) Thin ice, open water.

I watch the ducks in the slushy water, see their footprints on the thin ice. I am at the water's edge, where choice are made. I sit down in the snow, letting the cold draw my mind back from the river's current and to life. Breathe in, breathe out.

........................................................

Hours later, I am driving on slippery roads by another river. The truck fishtails around a curve, and I think, "No one would know." I put both hands on the steering wheel, grip so hard my knuckles are white, and by the will given me pull myself out of the river again and back onto the path before me.

A great brush swept smooth the mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children's voices, the shuffle of feet, people passing, humming traffic, rising and falling. Down, down to sink into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sink, and be muffled over. (Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf)

......................................................

The farm I am headed to glows bright with lights, and I shudder at cacophony of welcomes and rush upstairs to a quiet room no bigger than my bedroom closet. Slowly I unpack. Clothes. Toothbrush. A tall stack of books. Computer. Camera. So I trade prison for prison and bind my mind with iron bars as I try to let peace seep in through the gaps.

The next day is bright and windy, cold. I rush out in my pajamas for a walk. Steps beat hurriedly on the packed snow, and shout anxious, anxious, anxious. But the hands shake less, stuffed in pockets. The head slowly lifts to the light. The breath comes more slowly. I have survived the morning's assault.

The dog always walks with, several bounds ahead, sniffing, smiling, cooling himself in the snow. Occasionally he looks back to check on me. Dogs have a sense for the broken. They tend. Beast and the broken in some silent union know the truth.

I wake with a shudder, shake off the latest nightmare. The window glows pink, and I hear just a whisper, that whisper I've been waiting days to hear. I am here. So glows the sunrise, sure and steady, up and around the curve of the earth and down again, plunging us into night. For all mornings of all time, it shall be so. Somehow, in the concreteness of this rhythm, I anchor.

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveler and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution. Let me walk on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with all the rest. (Mrs. Dalloway)

Thoughts from my week of rest at the farm

missing family

seeking sanity

Pray I might find peace?

Books with empty pages

I read a whole book on

the Art of Happiness

by the Dalai Lama

and I learn nothing new.

I read Psalms that have watered my soul

and the words turn to dust in my mouth

...for such a time as this...

He lit up the cathedral on the farm

with white snow-light,

a million crystals suspended

in the wind

reflecting Grace on a chipped paint tack room

And that one thing,

the morning light,

the horse napping

Sara Groves told me in a song

you do your work the best that you can

you put one foot in front of the other 

life comes in waves and makes it's demands

you hold on as well as you’re able

you've been here for a long long time

but hope has a way of turning its face to you

just when you least expect it

you walk in a room 

you look out a window 

and something there leaves you breathless

you say to yourself

it's been a while since i felt this

but it feels like it might be hope 

Where is your face, Father?

Where is your hope?

How do I open hands to receive redemption -

the kind that rescues us from the everyday

not just that moment in heaven

when I see my name in the Book of Life.

I need you now

I need truth to be drink and food

replace these tears

and place before me a fresh cup

Space to breathe

My husband, wonderful husband, has given me a break. Time to breathe. To rediscover. To push tentacles into the Solid Rock. Would you be in prayer for me, my friends? That I would find that spirit of peace HE promises, that I would be impenetrable to the lies of the evil one, that I would heal and grow and come back home more whole?

Today I am in North Dakota with one of the wisest and sweetest 20 year olds I've known. I've cared for her since her infancy, and now she shrouds me with her grace, her embrace, her understanding. Tomorrow, another day here in the drifts. Next week, peace at her mother's farm. I leave house and hearth and husband and children to seek that peace the Savior offers. To refuse other gods, those gods of anxiety and pain and wishing for an end to suffering and an end to hurting those I love. Pray, oh, pray. I am in desperate need of that Grace I whispered "yes" to at 4 years old, the undeserved favor, the sweetness of the all-forgiving Christ love.

Pray it would surround me, bathe me, heal those ancient wounds with the washing of the Living Water and the blood shed for me.

Humbly I come before the Throne, and humbly I come to you, broken, asking that I  might see and believe and take hold to Redemption.

That darn rollercoaster again

The ocean is full of swells, whitecapped, surf blown off their creamy turquoise crests like whipped cream. Joy descends pell-mell into crushing sorrow. Sorrow billows up and out and beyond and there is joy again, waiting.

The choices seems to be diminishing before me as the doors in a long hall as you walk down it, paths untaken disappearing behind your footsteps. Would He - could He - be the funnel that drives me down to this narrow opening? Has He orchestrated so closely? Or am I falling prey to the mind games of anxiety, the whispers of the enemy hissing hesitation into my soul?

Oh, for rest, for rest. Oh for breath, for breath. My mouth is full of seawater. I need strength to keep swimming.

O Lord, I think I'm falling

To my disbelief

I'm cursing like a sailor and lying like a thief

It's hard to heed the calling from the better side of me

When I'm blaming everybody else and no one's coming clean

O Lord, can you see my thick skin wearing thin

And the demons of a lesser me are beckoning me in

Those who gathered 'round me - I'm watching them all leave

Cause I am my own ragged company

You can take a trip to China or take a boat to Spain

take a blue canoe around the world and never come back again

But traveling don't change a thing, it only makes it worse

Unless the trip you take is in to change your cruel course

'Cause every town's got a mirror and every mirror still shows me

That I am my own ragged company

O Lord it's lonely, Lord it's mighty cold

And I don't want to live this way

Afraid of growing old

It's hard to heed the warning when you cannot see the crime

The only way to remember is to forget in a rhyme

And I'm scared to tread the red road that leads to Galilee

Cause I am my own ragged company

~(I Am My Own) Ragged Company, Grace Potter~

Get busy living

Faith is a fragile thing. I close the soft covers of a controversial book with a slam, and dust rises in the sunlight glinting off my bed. Today is not a day to study my faith. Today is a day to live it.

Sun glints through the streamers on the rainbows hung from my kitchen windows, crafts left over from a "spring" birthday party, that warm day a memory now as we are buried in another foot of snow this mid-March. As the light gleams through the transparent paper, it is my faith I see, anchored to the rock, but tenuous, translucent, thin.

I don't know how to correctly interpret the Old Testament hermeneutically. I haven't read the latest from Rob Bell. What I know is this: today, if we don't praise God, the very rocks will cry out. And so that is what I will do today. Notice the gifts before me and praise the Maker for them.

Streamers in the sunlight, fluttering in the breeze of the warm furnace blowing. Children happy at schoolbooks. My Amy, exhausted of school, finding work for her hands, the clean wash water clear and pure in the afternoon kitchen. Oh, the gifts of each day, that crowd in bittersweet and make you want to laugh and cry all at once.

Today is for worship. Today is for gratitude that changes attitude. For joy that staves off darkness.

When I am Unlovely: Letters to Aaron

You curl around my back like my parentheses. Surrounding my body, my whirling thoughts, my discontent with a bracket as if this period of my life is just a passing thing, something added to the sentence for emphasis only.

You have looked into my wounded eyes and seen clear down to my soul and as you reached down there with your passionate gaze, deep, you dropped a handful of comfort into the empty places. You love me no matter what, in spite of, at all times. I cannot understand it.

You weep sometimes because I am weeping. Other times you implore me to see the beauty that you see and to turn away from brokenness. Both I love. You I love.

It's been a long season of me in hiding, me in transition, me in the metamorphosis of suffering. Sometimes I wonder if you will like who I am after this transformation. There is a magnet in the yellow kitchen that says, "I am on the second leg of a return trip to being ME." You met me before I embarked on the journey. Fell in love with me with so many unknowns. As the shroud lifts from my past and I let you into the darkness there, you show no judgment, you don't despise, you look around those rooms and you cry for what is missing and what exists - the emptiness and the pain.

You hold my hand like I am a little child and lead me through memories like an instructor, teaching me to know myself when I would rather turn away. That is brave. You, my prince, knight in shining armor. Foreshadowing of Christ the Bridegroom.

I am stronger because of you. More poetic. I dance because of you, and sing, too. I gather up life, all of it, like a heap of golden leaves in autumn, overflowing armfuls. You hunt joy with me and you hand me these gifts of moments all wrapped up and ready to open like presents. Present. You help me see the presents in the present.

What would I do without you?

I hear this song, and sometimes it is about you, and sometimes it is about God. And isn't that Ephesians 5:25-27, for you are to me as Christ is to church, and to see you similar - two Bridegrooms, one earthy, tangible, and One who waits quietly.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

I can see the pain behind your eyes

It's been there for quite a while

I just wanna be the one to remind you what it is to smile

I would like to show you what true love can really do

Girl, let me love you

And I will love you

Until you learn to love yourself

Girl, let me love you

I know your trouble

Don't be afraid, girl, let me help

Girl, let me love you

A heart of numbness, gets brought to life

I'll take you there

~Let Me Love You, Ne-Yo~

*images from Pinterest

My baby girl is 8!

Happy 8th birthday to my beautiful second baby girl, my Rosalita!

I never got to play with Barbies as a child. Rosy finds it funny that I'm loving it now.

A work in progress

If you are alive today, you are a work in progress. Unfinished. Still being refined. Untangled. Strung with pearls.

Sometimes you have to table your doubts like the dust on a working machine. If your faith is still working, maybe now is not the time to clean the cobwebs, read the books about the doubts you have. Maybe you need to lean on just a few words, like I am today: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my disbelief." (Mark 9:24)

Maybe there is beauty you can see today. Maybe you can mark it down in your mind on that endless list of gifts, blessings sent down from the Father of Lights.

Maybe you are peering into the dark for the beauty. Maybe you are holding your head in your hands, a head full of ache, a soul of distress, on the foggy moorland, wandering through the peat bogs, searching for home. Maybe today is more Wuthering Heights than Anne of Green Gables. Maybe it is an Isaiah day, a Lamentations day, maybe you can't end the Psalm yet with the praise part.

He is already there. Where you are finished, where He is finished with your refinement. He stands at the end of time, at the beginning of time, unbounded and with eyes seeing everything start to finish. As you hold your aching heart tight, against the hurts bound to come today, remember, He is there to bind those wounds. If not today, if you walk today wounded and the Savior does not come with His healing today, there is a day coming. The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted. (Isaiah 30:26).

When you will see the tears in the precious bottle, when you will see your name engraved on the palms of the suffering Savior's hands -reach out and touch those holes from the nails He lay still to be pierced for you - and in the pages of His book of life, when you will be unbounded by the darkness of time and you will see. He is giving you beauty for ashes.